The Hidden Power of Twitter Custom Timelines

I, and many of the people I follow don't use hash tags in that way. Many never use them at all. For me, hash tags are useless as metadata. They are often solely used as jokes.

Here is the original twitter dev blog post if anyone wants to see it [1]. I hope this does not come off an condescending and negative, but my honest reaction is "What took so long"?? It blows my mind that it took 7 years to realize/implement this feature.

One of the main reasons I don't regularly use Twitter is because there is too much white noise. It's hard for me to find information of value because the comments are all over the place. Even when I follow a strict set of People specific to an Industry or a Topic, create specific lists, etc; it's still too much white noise (example; interesting post right next to what someone else had for breakfast).

I am actually quite frustrated with the entire thing. Being someone interested in Development and Solving Problems, I know this can be better. And on that front, it's great to see that this feature finally exists. But there is so much more that could be done to make it even better. It's frustrating because the issue relates to a core Twitter experience, which (under [2] API v1.1 Developer Rules of the Road section 1.5) cannot be replicated. So the end result, I'll probably just have to wait for the customer feedback loop process to complete (which likely takes a long time). Hopefully in the future I'll see some of the features that I had once hoped to build myself. Until then, I probably won't be a regular Twitter user. Frustrating.

If anyone at Twitter reads this, I would be more than happy to describe in detail some of the ways that I think the timeline can become more relevant and valuable. I've talked about it here on HN (project name is InfoStream), and it basically relates to a correlation of GeoLocation Data and Time with relation to Real World Events.

[1] https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-custom-timelines

[2] https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms

This actually will be very useful for following products/news/webcomics/etc online if they develop a convention for using a hashtag on a new release.

Obviously Twitter is a poor-man's RSS, but it's better than nothing.

Twitter is subtly trying to encourage users to add topics (in the form of hashtags) to their tweets. It has advantages at both ends - from a user perspective : you can pick and choose topics to follow and from an advertiser's perspective : you now have more contextual information about the tweet. It might help you serve better ads and recommendations. However, if this encourages such a behavior there is a very good chance of lists becoming obsolete. Rather than lists one would simply create a timeline of users (with a given hashtag) and share it to the world.

The first use for Custom Timelines I thought of was the kind of themed collection of tweets you see people retweet sometimes, like this collection of people who didn't get what they wanted for Christmas a few years ago:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/daves4/people-who-didnt-get-what-the...